Politics is Metaphysics (3): Crisis of the Left

18 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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consciousness, Enlightenment, History, Marxism, materialism, metaphysics, patriarchy, political orientation, spirituality, thinking, transcendence, war

Posting 117, word count: 1199

Metaphysics is the ultimate weakness of the political left-wing. Right-wing politics is the promotion of patriarchy, and the main pillar of patriarchy is the widespread personal orientation (superego) formed around bogyman metaphysics, assumptions of cosmic moral ledger-keeping in preparation for a final reckoning, a cosmic plan. Any conception such as karma that includes the idea of a cosmic reckoning, or any other reward and punishment after death, is personification of nature on the grand scale (bogyman metaphysics), entrenching an idealized paradigm of patriarchy as a top-down personal orientation. Platonic Ideal Forms and any other metaphysics ascribing primacy to some conception of eternal Being or a Great Chain of Being are also examples of top-down metaphysics. It is the top-down orientation which confers meaning on imperialistic war. Right-wingers have elaborate social and biological theories (Hobbes, Darwin) cementing conflict, trophies, and centralized monopolies of violence as crucial forces of civilization and society. Such theories are expressions of top-down metaphysical assumptions, and the metaphysics is the ultimate support of right-wing political power. Right-wing thinking operates in an overall conception in which the objective world consists of certain specific, determinate, and eternal structures (great chain of being) and categories (atomic facts) which pre-determine what is correct thinking and perception for every individual. In that right-wing world everyone’s subjectivity must be and should be formed by, and subordinate to, the determinate structures and categories of the objective world, including social, economic, and political structures. The right-wing orientation is a looking outward for transcendence or for an equivalent for transcendence in material determinism, categorically given and absolute in the Great Chain of Being. Top-down metaphysics is entirely bogus but unfortunately is the universal cultural default, entrenched by history and tradition. Such is the dystopia in which the prospects and strategies for autonomous thinking as an individual must be devised. The good news is that, since the personal superego is the patriarchy, then disrupting the patriarchy is an accomplishment of thinking, an intellectual and cultural enterprise. More good news is that there has been since ancient times a cultural stream of philosophical thinking, a minority report, that resisted and disputed the dominant orientation.

Historical Roots of the Political Left

The main roots of the political left, expressed for example in socialism, are in the philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, specifically in the radical branch of the Enlightenment which asserted universal human rationality, a transcendent power at the level of the individual, and developed that claim into a profound rejection of social and economic inequality as most evident in such institutions as monarchy, aristocracy, and religious hierarchies. The other looming presence in the ideology of the left, Marxist theory, was merely a footnote to and a distortion of Enlightenment ideas, and Enlightenment ideology itself was a particular formulation of the cultural stream of philosophical thinking that disputed the dominant orientation since antiquity. Marxist theory attempted to change the foundation of egalitarianism from universal human rationality (at the level of the individual) to the predetermined working out of economic laws governing class struggle in history: dialectical materialism. It was a variant of Hegelian (top-down) metaphysics, driven by the cosmic Final Cause, and a tragic dead end innovation. The collapse of communism in The Soviet Union and eastern Europe exposed the absurdity of using materialism as a bottom-up foundation for such Enlightenment ideas as innate rationality, equality, individual human dignity and rights, secularism, cosmopolitanism, and representative democracy. Although materialism can claim to be an alternative to top-down orientations, and was promoted as such by the radical branch of Enlightenment, it cannot avoid determinism and so becomes a justification for anything that exists. The idea of economic determinism is still an institutionalized assumption in the science of economics. Karl Marx’s ideas of dialectical materialism and laws of history demonstrate how materialism settles into strict fatalism, unfreedom, and the impossibility of transcendence (the creation of unforeseeable alternatives and possibilities). The loss of transcendence carries the implication that everything has to be just the way it has always been. The collapse of Marxism was not the collapse of the long historical development of egalitarianism as implicit in Enlightenment ideas, because the same egalitarianism was vestigial in ancient humanist philosophy and in Renaissance humanism and in a continuous stream of cultural developments in western cultural history. The pressure of egalitarianism has lasted so long against apparently crushing forces because it expresses the fundamental reality of transcendence at the level of the individual, implicit in the idea of universal human rationality. The collapse of Marxism merely discredits materialist and top-down metaphysics (as in economic theory) as a base for the political left.

Metaphysics for the Political Left

Although in the early twenty-first century the political left is faltering badly for lack of an articulated metaphysics, it already has an informal conceptual framework, a thinking orientation, which implies its metaphysics. Left-wing thinking operates in a conception of the world in which individual subjectivity has an important degree of creative freedom to conceptualize and re-conceptualize the structures of the world, and to intervene in forming and altering those structures. In that context, individual subjectivities have a mission that goes beyond struggling for survival and acquiring trophies and knowledge of objective facts, a mission, instead, to conceive and make an authentically personal mark on the world, to bring goods from a spiritual interiority and inject them into the shape of the public world. Creating structures of mutually nurturing sociability is an essential part of that mission. On the left-wing view, then, individual subjectivity is transcendent in relation to the merely inertial and entropic world. If metaphysics is the identification of transcendence, then the political left is already committed to a metaphysics. Consciousness itself, the being of a spiritual person, a self-constructing idea of a life-in-progress actively opening the world by creatively thinking and working itself into the world, is the only fountain of unforeseeable possibilities creating the openness to an otherwise inertial and entropic world. That makes thinking the transcendent power. Consciousness (thinking) is not a single occurrence but a multitude of separate and distinctly embodied instances, individual animal bodies, some of them human.

The salvation of the left does not lie in abandoning transcendence in a rush to the metaphysical bottom of materialism, nor in a backward-looking reverence for antique conceptions of top-down cosmic providence, but instead in a reconceptualizing of transcendence that builds on the Enlightenment recognition of individual rationality. The great mistake in metaphysics has been to gaze outward, especially toward far horizons, squinting to make out messages in the haze. The focus of metaphysics has to be the looking itself, not what is seen but the seeing. Consciousness, and only consciousness, is transcendent, and consciousness occurs only at the level of the individual, and not as a passive receptivity but instead in the application of personal context in a moment of interpretive sensitivity, a context-projecting moment of interpretation. There is no looking or seeing without an encounter of personally specific context with novel sensitivity, a personally spiritual act.

Western History

19 Wednesday Jul 2017

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Equality, Hierarchy, Political Power

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History, hive mind, modernity, politics, sovereignty

What makes the history of the Euro-American cultural system interesting is not the west’s imperialistic dominance of the world at large, and it isn’t the development of empirical science and technology which contributed so much to that imperialism. It isn’t even the economic developments that present such a wealth of consumer goods and services and generally improved health, longevity, and leisure, making modernity the age of abundance driven by competitive materialism and reliable capital gains. Instead, and contrary to the story of human history presented to students in high schools or STEM programs, the decisive theme of western history has been a contest over the legitimacy of systems of sovereignty. This is most clearly evident in the historical spiral of revolt which began in Europe with John Wycliffe about thirty years after the Great Plague of 1348-50 and culminated in the French Revolution of 1789-99. In response to the attempt by the ruling factions of Medieval Christendom to perfect the strictest uniformity of collective hive mind, there blossomed the most profound resistance, critique, and assertion of alternatives. Universal literacy, mass education, a research imperative, and some democratic influence (elections) on institutions of sovereignty are all conspicuous consequences of the ongoing opposition to perennial oligarchic dominance, and of the central place in western history of an ongoing series of challenges to the legitimacy of such sovereignty. This is the real treasure of the west.

Social Contract as Hive Mind (2)

18 Thursday May 2017

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Narrative, Political Power

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Christendom, dystopia, hive mind, legacy culture, mass media, Roman Empire, Romanticism, social construction, spooks, western history

tags: western history, hive mind, Christendom, Roman Empire, social construction, spooks, mass media, legacy culture, dystopia, romanticism

The social construction of hive mind is not new. The historical background of our modern hive minds is Christendom, the way European society conceived itself from, say, the year 800 until Henry VIII’s break from Roman authority in 1534. Christendom was a strenuous and effective attempt at constructing hive mind, based on collective terror of spooky spirit-world angels and demons. Europe was a largely rural-agrarian and illiterate society dominated by a centrally organized Church and a de-centralized military/ propertied aristocracy from the ranks of which emerged regional dynastic monarchies. The Church altar and pulpit were the mass media of Christendom and gave the Vatican an edge over other social elements in arranging uniformity of attitudes and loyalty across vast territories, in fact, a theocracy. The thoroughness of the hive mind engineered throughout Europe by ideologues and agents of Christendom, mainly within institutions connected to the Vatican, established an historically new standard of monumental collective commitment, uniformity, cohesion, and rigidity; a romanticized idea of hive solidarity that continues to plague subsequent societies. Roman Church orthodoxy was a superlatively elaborate and uniform message, having appropriated useful chunks of Plato, Aristotle, and Stoicism. Unquestioning assertion of the resulting construct was policed viciously by the inquisition from around 1184 and by military crusades for larger outbreaks of dissent, offering crusaders complete immunity, forgiveness of sins, and all the loot they could manage. The ongoing use of Latin as the language of Church institutions, including universities, is an indication of the small “r” romanticism at the foundation of that hive mind. As far as the Vatican was concerned, Christendom was still the Roman Empire, with all the traditional authority of the Roman Imperium, carrying the weight of Rome’s entire historical imprint on the world: material, military, intellectual, institutional, legal, and spiritual. Prior to Christendom, the Roman Empire was arguably the most effective hive mind in all of human experience, for centuries imposing a heavily armed Roman peace over the Mediterranean world system. The medieval Roman Church did its best to expand the ancient Imperial legacy. A case could be made that it was the grotesque scope and intensity of Christendom’s hive mind that gave Europe its aggressive edge in subsequent encounters with other world cultures.

In the transfiguration from Medieval Christendom to modernity, the centralization of social supervision characteristic of the theocratic hive mind was not demolished but merely fragmented into a number of less all-embracing hierarchies, which learned to cooperate and compliment one another. There is a fundamental identity between old-time religious hive mind construction and the mind control managed by supervising institutions in contemporary societies. Spooks continue to be useful in the form of awesome personified abstractions commanding patriotism and fear such as the U.S.A., the British Crown and Commonwealth, China, the Dear Leader, Capitalism, Islam, IBM, Microsoft, or even the Free World. Modern societies are largely a landscape of mountainous commercial organizations producing profits for investors. Every corporation is a mini-Vatican with its own brand-myth and corporate culture which includes company-spirit and a star-system of corporate celebrities. Every employer expecting brand loyalty and competitive spirit is creating a hive that is structured as a cell within the superstructure of city, nation state, and international capitalism. Indeed, every high school is a training mini-Vatican with its religion of school spirit and sport team troops, its heroes and enemies; patterns downloaded from university collegiate culture. We are trained to hive mind from an early age.

As presented in part 1, the context of these observations is this: There are some clearly positive consequences to predictability and stability in cooperative effort. The question is, are there also negative consequences to this way of creating stability, and is it possible to do anything about them if there are? How might it even be possible to re-orient outside the influence of an ambient hive mind?

… continues.

Canadian Values

26 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Narrative

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Christendom, conservatism, Enlightenment, Greco-European philosophy, History, Islam, literacy, monotheism, politics, property rights, spirituality

Posting 105

Tags: politics, history, Greco-European philosophy, spirituality, Enlightenment, literacy, Christendom, Islam, monotheism, property rights, conservatism

There certainly was a long history of conflict and animosity between European Christendom and the ‘empire’ of Islam. That history of conflict included the Christian crusades beginning in the eleventh century, as well as both the Islamic Turkish conquest of Constantinople and the “reconquest” of Spain by Christian armies in the fifteenth century. Christendom’s fear of being encircled by Islam at that time inspired its push westward across the Atlantic, and so in part, inspired its subsequent global imperialism. However, since then, an historical singularity has occurred, and almost incredibly, the western cultural system has moved beyond its Judeo-Christian cultural heritage, so that the twenty-first century situation is nothing like a replay of the pre-modern “clash of civilizations”.

It is simply not true, for example, that gender equality is a Judeo-Christian value. Neither Jewish nor Christian culture treats women as equal to men, and that is a glaring dystopian feature of the patriarchal legacy of father-god monotheism. Democracy isn’t a Judeo-Christian idea either, but rather an idea from ancient Greece, long before the Christian era and independent of ancient Judaic influence. The Greek idea of democracy was associated with a concept of political equality with strict limitations but with potential for expansion. That potential had to wait a long time as a weak minority report within Christendom, in remnants of a Stoic, humanist influence, sometimes buried in monastic libraries. It was given some significant boosts in a number of subsequent European cultural developments: the movement for universal literacy in vernacular languages from around the time of Wycliffe (1380’s), violently resisted by the Church; again, in the context of the Renaissance fascination with ancient Greco-Roman paganism came the launch of the printing press in the fifteenth century; and once again in the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformation’s emphasis on mass literacy, and the subsequent development of the Republic of Letters outside the reach of institutions. It was dissident philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment who built on all that deep groundwork and used philosophical ideas of innate rationality, equality, individual human dignity and rights, secularism, cosmopolitanism, and representative democracy to launch a world-changing critique of their Christian society, until then dominated by dynastic monarchies in alliance with hierarchies of Christian clergy and military aristocracy already well along in looting the world in their brutal imperialism. So, the Enlightenment did not appear out of nothing, like a bolt from the blue, but was another step in an enduring dance entangling cultural legacies with the emerging experience of new generations of humans. The values of modern urban democracies (often still aspirational) should be described as radical Enlightenment values, not Judeo-Christian values. The Enlightenment assertion of equality, based on the universal dignity merited by inherent rationality (related to linguistic competence and literacy), was in dramatic opposition to the prevailing Christian norms based on the dark myth of inherent evil, original sin. Given this history, the cultural conflict we are living through now features remnants of the monotheist religions of the Middle East, all adorations of patriarchal inequality, on one side, against more recent developments of an individualistic humanism from ancient Greek philosophy on the other. This isn’t just a clash between Greco-Roman vs Judaic cultural legacies. This goes deeper. The ancient Greek rationalist philosophers found the portal beyond culture into elemental spirituality, which turned out to be individual as defined by the individual human body, so these different ideas cannot dovetail into a symbiotic coexistence. They are fundamentally incompatible and opposed to one another, founding the unbridgeable cultural divide between conservative and progressive political forces.

Conservatism and Property

Proponents of political conservatism, heirs of patriarchal monotheism, claim to champion individualism, but in conservative ideology, property rights take the place of individual human rights. Ownership of property, frequently including people made into property by being entirely deprived of rights, was the crucial marker of value and status in the hierarchical social order of pre-Enlightenment Christendom. Individuals with the most property have the most rights in the patriarchal worldview, and distribution of the world’s property was mostly completed long ago, establishing “facts on the ground” that conservatives strive to preserve. Property possession brings with it not only an obsession with guns and protection by violence, but also the “us against them” package of emotional triggers. The conservative claim to individualism comes down to placing supreme value on ownership of property, which has an inherent male bias from the long history of patriarchal dominance. Property rights are so dominant in conservative ideology that the holding of legal title to property by corporations confers on them the status of individual persons. This whole property rights focus creates an entirely bogus individualism because holding possession of property is absolutely dependant on a vast organizational support of laws, courts, lawyers, and weaponized enforcement. Conservatism is mainly about preventing or at least minimizing redistribution of property (wealth) by sovereign institutions. Sovereign institutions are otherwise very dear to the hearts of property hoarders because such institutions have the armed power to protect and defend property possession. However, there is a vulnerability in that sovereign power because if it falls under certain influences and ideas of justice, it also has the innate potential to enforce the redistribution of property. When sovereign governments come under the influence of people and ideologies in favour of material equality, then the forces of conservatism push for the limitation of sovereign power.

Andrew Coyne, for example (in the National Post, November 6, 2015), has claimed that the essence of conservatism is the limitation of power, but such a claim is true only in the context of cultural pressures for enhancing material equality. The reality is that property rights are so central to conservatism that on that view the institutions of sovereignty must be restrained when exposed to democracy, because broadly based electorates might not be unreservedly dedicated to protecting property rights. In this context, the conservative rhetoric of limiting the power of elites is also misleading. Conservatives have no problems with lethal military elites (special forces), with sporting elites glorifying masculinity, investor elites symbolizing success, religious elites policing conformity, or elites of heroic patriots as universal role models. The rhetoric against “elites” is mainly resistance to the rationally based individualism accomplished by education, and as such a form of nostalgia for the pre-Enlightenment world ruled by religious supervision, fervent nationalism, and patriarchal family culture. The adulation of pretty much all elites is core conservatism, called “celebrating excellence” or “appreciating exceptional success”. It is practically the state religion of the U.S.A., although actualized in such a way as not to disrupt the traditional hierarchy of wealth and power. Conservative adulation of excellence and exceptional success excludes only those founded on advanced literacy and education, and that is a crucial lens for seeing into the heart of conservatism. Intellectual achievement is the portal to the spirituality beneath Enlightenment individualism, emphasizing spiritual qualities and competencies inherent in every individual, independent of possession of trophy properties, and as such tending toward a universal sociability in conflict with the “us against them” essentials of conservatism.

The current mass displacements of people from wars visited upon mainly Muslim countries by the Euro-American military/ political system is providing a pretext for anti-Enlightenment movements in the west to launch campaigns invoking the pre-modern “clash of civilizations” based on false claims that western culture is still Judeo-Christian and as such threatened by Muslim migration. This historical falsehood is presumably intended to resuscitate the appearance of relevance in outmoded Judeo-Christian beliefs, and inspire a resurgence of loyalty to the Christian legacy of authoritarian patriarchal society, fervent patriotism as a surrogate religion, communal adulation of warlike masculine virtues such as strength, competitive spirit, and kinetic action, restoring females as property, and reverting to attitudes that are anti-abortion and anti-gay. Such is conservatism. However, in the modern urban community such values are all widely and deeply contested by the legacies of Greek and European philosophical Enlightenment. The philosophic revolution, the rising prestige and urban spread of the kind of secular spiritual autonomy modelled in ancient philosophical thinking, is still advancing. Although the commanding heights, the institutions which structure the society, are all bastions of patriarchal culture, and we still live within that nexus of social supervision, we have less fear of, less trust in, and less emotional reliance on authorities of all kinds. Very slowly the historical singularity of Enlightenment individualism, and the kind of freedom and equality it carries, is dissolving the cultures inclined to be anti-Enlightenment. There is no reason to doubt that it will continue to dissolve the legacy cultures of any immigrant proponents of patriarchy. An irony of the current anti-Muslim campaign by conservative groups is that they share many core values with this culture they purport to oppose, because both are remnants of the patriarchal monotheist religions of the Middle East. Conservative groups are despising their own mirror image.

What is Patriarchy?

02 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Political Power, Subjectivity

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anarchic interconnection, Cogito ergo sum, dominance culture, Gender culture, History, ideality, interior individualism, language acquisition, literacy, nurture culture, patriarchy, politics, Renaissance, symbols and pageantry of dominance

This is dedicated to the happy memory of Weldon Matthews, scholar, artist, actor, teacher, playwright, producer, director, creative collaborator, friend.

Tags: patriarchy, history, politics, gender cultures, ideality culture, anarchic interconnection, dominance, symbols and pageantry of dominance, nurture, first-language acquisition, literacy, Renaissance, interior individualism, Cogito ergo sum.

History can be sketched as the career of relations among certain distinct cultural engines or streams, but three especially are comprehensively important. These three culture streams have very different values, models of relationship, and concepts of personal identity, and so endure an uneasy coexistence. One is a female managed, child-nurture-focused culture in which all human beings learn our first language and most other culture. This is the ongoing conversation between childhood innocence and adult sophistication. Adult sophistication is often morphing into something new, but childhood innocence is always basically ecstatic, curious, and eager to engage. This first-language-nurture culture is mainly female, thrives by cultivating collective support and sociability, emphasizing language and recognition of individual voices. Separate from that but vastly parasitic on it is a competitive alpha-trophy culture of dominance which developed into military and corporate culture and into sovereign states. Alpha culture is mainly male and worships and celebrates competition for dominance and the benefits of dominance. The key benefit of dominance is top-down human macro-parasitism, from which other benefits flow. Many such benefits are the symbols and pageantry of dominance, trophies, for example in the scale of property possession and in relationships marked by hierarchical inequality (master/slave). Money culture, market wealth, is a branch of dominance culture because the scale of property possession is crucial in the pageantry and symbolism of dominance. Part of alpha-trophy culture is denigration of alternative culture streams, defining them as inferior to and dependent on itself, and maintaining a sense of urgency about keeping them in some degree of dishonour and disgrace. The third stream is a spin-off from the cultural importance of language and conversation, namely scribal culture, the culture of literacy and literature, intellectual culture. Scribal schools, libraries, universities, and commercial publishing have cultivated this distinct culture of collective intelligence that features individual voices expressing a reading/writing persona as distinct from a strictly social persona. This culture cultivates a personally interior thinking life of interpretive and critical reading, writing, and long deliberation, is essentially androgynous and often celebrates originality, which is to say, anarchy, even though it is often cultivated by and within hierarchical organizations. Separate from all of these is every individual’s subjective innocence, which the immersion in culture and history can never smother completely. The essential identity of everyone as an individual is an active process of creative orientation, a personal interiority of spiritual non-actuality, intervening continuously in brute actuality as a particular embodiment. Individuals get deeply immersed in pre-existing streams of culture early in life, but creative thinking, reconceptualization, is performed entirely at the level of the individual.

Why Religions Don’t Count

Religions are also important culture streams, conservatories of a certain kind of metaphysical ideology. In general, religions counsel their flocks to seek refuge and tranquility in the promise of an eternal and other-worldly transcendence to be actualized in a distant future, and so to disengage from concerns about power and wealth in the empires of this world. By this token, religions universally advance a top-down cosmic orientation that depicts normal individuals at the bottom of a metaphysical chain of command, a placement that lacks both power and rights-meriting status. That places religions perfectly to serve as the “ministry of mystical justification” for alpha-trophy dominance culture, and they frequently partner with imperial organizations in pacification and control of the low-status masses. Religions have often placed high value on scribal culture as the guardian and interpreter of holy texts and codes of law elaborated from such texts. However, religions do not merit inclusion with the three culture streams sketched above because the hierarchy they model in their ideology and organization is derived wholesale from the culture of dominance, and the ethics of care and nurture they occasionally encourage is derived wholesale from the culture of nurture. As for scribal culture, although there was a very early association of writing with supernatural powers and magic, and with imperial organization, scribal culture developed in a way that makes it independently relevant wherever language-based ways of learning and understanding are involved, and ultimately cultivates the inscribing of individual voices, beyond the reach of other streams of culture. Intrinsic to scribal culture, although often uncredited, is an experience of spirituality that is completely at odds with the top-down centralized hierarchy typical in religions and traditional military-based institutions of sovereignty.

Why Class Struggle Doesn’t Count

The economic and political overclass, the class of patricians, the most dominant operators of dominance culture, oriented within old and highly developed ideologies sanctifying macro-parasitism in the patrician way of life, is certainly class conscious as a distinct social entity, but there is no equivalent but distinct worldview for a proletariat, a working or plebeian class. In fact, the culturally supplied conceptual reality within which working people orient ourselves is pervaded by the patrician ideology, the top-down metaphysical (religious) chain of command which sanctifies the existence of subordination. There is nothing intrinsic to the cultural legacies from “folk cultures” to seriously discredit the hierarchical metaphysics that anchors the patrician worldview. The conservatism of the privileged has often found an ally in proletarian conservatism. Proletarian males are carriers of alpha-trophy dominance culture just as much as males everywhere, because it represents the cultural ideals of masculinity. To the extent that proletarian class values are represented by socialism, they are derived wholesale from nurture culture. In any case, nobody but patricians wants there to be an enduring and culturally distinct proletarian class. The conclusion is that, in terms of historical political developments, the class of proletarians is not an autonomous engine. The opposition to competitive dominance culture has come from nurture culture and the literary culture of interior individualism.

The Three Streams

The three culture streams that are autonomous engines-of-community are all very ancient. The stream of scholarship goes back to the invention of writing from something like 5,000 years ago, plausibly in ancient Mesopotamian Sumer. Mastering the craft of literacy tends to form social bonds among its devotees. The alpha-trophy dominance culture found its ideal form in the conquering outpourings from the Great Eurasian Steppe, fountain of macro-parasitic herding culture. However, the first-language-nurture culture is surely the oldest, from the first human development of language between mother and child. Although these culture streams are autonomous to an important extent, having maintained their separate operations for thousands of years, they also survive by using, tolerating, and intermingling with each other. For example, dominance culture became the ideal of masculinity and so has a strong influence wherever there are men, especially men in groups devoted to physical strength, death-defying fearlessness, and kinetic action. Scholarly culture was a male preserve through most of its existence, and so the influence of the power-adulating culture of masculinity can be recognized in most intellectual work. For example, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) represents a number of philosophers who were childless and single privileged men immersed in a minority culture of alpha-male competition for dominance in the pageantry of seventeenth century Europe. It is not surprising that scholars or intellectuals in that setting grasped human nature as little more than egoism and a war of all against all, because that represents their ideal of masculinity. The parochial narrowness of their experience institutionalized a crucially distorted conception of human nature which is still plaguing us. In ancient times Plato and, much later, Augustine also were embedded in privileged male culture-pods. Those philosophers believed human attachment to be brittle and possible only as a gift from awe-inspiring power, requiring submission to power. Like Hobbes, they glorified the state as the greatest human achievement. The modern state was conceived and put into practice in the cultural matrix which made life interesting and fun for competitive alpha males. The other gender-based worldview, the realm of child-nurture, managed and cultivated by women, was effectively unknown, ignored, and despised by men from time out of mind, a cultured policy of willful blindness. The alpha-trophy culture claims the exclusive distinction of authentically expressing nature, but that claim is a ridiculous bias. The female cultivated culture of first-language-nurture has every bit as legitimate a claim to express nature (and a greater claim to intelligence), and points toward a social organization much different from the dominance pageantry of capitalism. When the value of nurturing children enters the picture, what is natural is co-operation, play, sharing, and love.

First-Language-Nurture Culture

That there is more than egoism motivating intelligences is illustrated most spectacularly in first-language-nurture collectives. Women and children do the work of connecting, caring, nurturing. Undefeated by all the macro-parasitism imposed on them by powerful collectives and individuals, a majority of women persist in their work of building connection with new human arrivals, engaging face to face through innumerable hours of an infant’s learning the ways of human interconnectedness and especially language. Mothers in that situation also find one another and share in building the culture of nurture and caring support. What parents, especially mothers, enjoy doing for their children, for each other, for other people’s children, for their parents, siblings, and friends is a conspicuous example of non-egoistic human interconnectedness. The first-language-nurture culture is robust and ancient, providing parenting, belonging within personal interconnectedness, language skills, and mutual adult support. The fact that the first-language-nurture culture and operations are not recognized as the foundation of social order reveals that nasty political forces are at work. That the common distribution of nurture has been ignored so consistently by social and economic philosophers, such as Hobbes and Adam Smith, who insisted that egoism alone is dominant in individuals, shows that the intended audience of such authors was the collective of privileged males enjoying benefits from acting out the egoistic alpha-trophy ideology of masculinity. There are two very distinct and contrasting gender-based world-views in the human community, and the one focused on the value of dominance recognizes the other (often unconsciously) as an existential threat.

The most pervasive motivational narrative in modern culture, the official meaning of modern life, could be described as self-definition through competition in the market economy. However, the dominance of such a view is another instance of a cultured contempt for the female-managed and child-centred value matrix, because the conversation with children and the social life which surrounds it have been more rewarding and meaningful all along and everywhere. As a force for social stability, the most undervalued asset is children. People continue to have children not because children are cute, or from brute instinct to continue the species, but because children are contributors to the vitality of the human conversation, crucial interlocutors for adults. The innocent curiosity, love of honest attachment, and delight in questioning and discovery characteristic of children is valuable in itself and not just as a stage to be rushed through on the way to adult mentality. Couples often reach a point of wanting to part company, but it is very rare for anyone to want to separate from their children. Even parents who become alienated from adult children reach out again when grandchildren appear. The bond with children is the strongest in human experience. (Children also keep re-inventing language instead of just passively learning it.) As a social foundation, then, we retain a focus on arrangements around the conversation with our children and the innocent love and playfulness they offer. That includes the reality and force of first-language-nurture culture, authentic attachment, elemental bonding, and sharing awareness between individual voices. Children still count as the focus of meaning for all classes, largely a nihilism-free zone. The imperative to nurture children ties people to stability in production and consumption, but not to any particular ideology or metaphysical assumptions.

Social Order

Hobbes failed to recognize or imagine that there is another common experience of human interconnectedness, namely from within the culture of intense personal engagement with newborns, infants, and toddlers for the project of initiating them into the connection of intelligences through language, shared culture, caring, and nurture generally. From that alternative ‘state of nature’ the interconnectedness develops without a social contract or a law-giver from above. The fact that women carry on with their nurture culture is what actually accounts for the stability of human interconnectedness. The guarantor and binding mechanism of social order and human communication networks is not the sovereign authority of the star-system meritocracy, nor its police forces, armies, guns, or prisons. Sovereignty is not the source of social stability. Social order and interconnectedness are products of the informal non-family collectives which groups of mothers form with their children to have the children play together and learn to speak the communal language. Such groups tend to ignore family separations and instead create informal collectives pragmatically with any willing mothers in the vicinity. They build on and extend accomplishments from the countless hours that mothers spend engaged with their children, face to face, voice to voice, enjoying the elemental pleasure and mutual inspiration that particular intelligences experience in connecting with each other.

Nurture and War

The extended nexus of first-language acquisition is in some ways a conservative force since stability is necessary for nurturing children. However, it doesn’t value wars, gambling, or radical inequality, some of the worst plagues on humanity, which are treasured by the alpha-structure. Nurture culture has an intrinsic tendency toward promoting equality because it is common knowledge within that culture that huge investments of loving care, personal attachment, energy, strategy, and work go into the survival and linguistic engagement of every human being, and it is bestial and criminal to waste any single one. The main reason to avoid violence is that violence disrespects not only its victims but all the sacred investment of nurture that supported their survival. First-language-nurture groups create the interconnectedness in the first place and work on it day in and day out, so when the interconnectedness is poisoned there is bound to be some alienation and rage among people working to keep it vital. It adds another layer to the rage and alienation from having the work and persons of females disrespected almost universally, a situation that is made difficult to correct because of the immediate demands of nurturing work. The point is not that women are uniquely able or impelled to nurture, but that a fundamental sociability in human spirituality is revealed in nurturing activity, that such widespread devotion reveals the depth of sociability in human spirituality generally. There is no justification here or anywhere for the ghettoization of nurture or of women’s choice of work.

Dominance Culture

The alpha-structure devises an economic and political agenda so that wars can still be fought, transferrable wealth funnelled upward and concentrated, the gambling addiction of the finance industry celebrated, money from corporate crime laundered, and the privileges and pleasures of unlimited wealth can be undisturbed. It accepts that the commonality of people are more usable, compliant, obedient, and manageable when kept in a vulnerable psychological state and guided within certain boundaries of experience. The alpha-structure craves the macro-parasitic fruits of economic and political control, and psychological manipulation is simply an essential aspect of that control. Part of that is a requirement to trivialize and denigrate the vital importance of the first-language-nurture culture which is actually the source of stability in the human interconnectedness. The core ethos of the alpha-trophy faction is full-spectrum dominance and the elimination of competition from alternative visions, by kinetic violence if necessary. It is not possible for people high on that Kool-Aid to do anything other than ridicule any generalization of the value of nurture. Under dominance culture, the political marginalization of the first-language-nurture culture is so extreme that the arrival of a continuous stream of new persons, linguistically and socially equipped and competent, is passed over as an event of brute nature, a given like minerals in the ground. Women doing the work of building fundamental attachments among separate intelligences are discounted as fauna, operating under biological compulsions, “maternal instinct”.

Scribal Culture

Just as the nurture of children (and community) by mothers reveals an aspect of humanity beyond the conception and comfort zone of social theories like Hobbes’, the same is true of the personal experience of, and a certain chain of political interventions by, literary culture. Even though literary arts were and are sponsored and exploited by alpha-families and religious cults as supports for intimidating dominance, the mental life of a literate person acquaints him or her with private experience of a certain freedom and self-possession. The gift of scribal culture is enrichment of personal interiority, an elaborate interior identity, direct acquaintance with ideality as secular spirituality. Individuals are gratified by such personally interior processes as questioning and creative reconceptualization and by expressing that creativity in a distinctive voice. (Personal orientation is not a structure of symbols, but rather an interior spiritual bearing of intervention within brute actuality.) The mental life of literacy occasioned a kind of thinking that came to be called “rational”, willing to evaluate different sides of an argument with no limit on time since propositions exist in objective form for any reader consider. The cultural stream of reading and writing, abstract thinking and study, critique, and interpretation, more than either of the others highlights a depth of creativity and freedom at the level of the individual, the literary voice as distinct from the social voice. It elaborated a spiritual world of ideas as a vast context for strict concreteness.

Proof of the innovative political force of literary culture is in the pudding of history. For example, essential to the European Renaissance was the confrontation of Christendom with long-gone ancient pagan culture, based on the re-discovery of ancient texts and works of art, and a re-evaluation of pagan culture to acknowledge its general superiority. The context for development of European education at that crucial stage was an urgency to benefit from the previous culture which had produced inspiring people, with inspiring literary voices and thoughts. (It wasn’t about concrete economic pragmatism.) A crucial piece of what excited Renaissance Europeans was pagan humanist individualism (Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism), an excitement that launched a philosophical de-stabilization of the Christian ideology around the spirituality and destiny of the human individual. There was also a technological innovation, the printing press, which accelerated the pre-existing movement for universal literacy. The great western spiral of revolt that started in the time of John Wycliffe (1331-1384) and the Oxford Lollards was associated with Wycliffe’s movement to promote proletarian literacy in vernacular languages, especially by translation of the Bible, a clear case of political intervention by the scribal culture stream. The Church of Rome was strongly against unauthorized Bible reading. Subsequent Protestant piety required universal literacy in vernacular languages so every individual could read and interpret holy scripture, an accomplishment that conferred on every individual a new kind of spiritual dignity.

Throughout the earlier medieval period, aristocracy had been a kind of junior partner to the Church in the sovereign supervision of Christendom, but the Renaissance involved an assertion of independence by aristocracy and monarchy. Church, monarchy, and aristocracy were the overt structures of sovereign power, institutions of the alpha-trophy culture of dominance. However, the Renaissance also featured a momentous, if less conspicuous, cultural movement, namely a sharp increase in the prestige of literacy, bookishness, and scholarly contemplative culture (including philosophy) which become an alternative model of virtue and accomplishment, a way to authority and accomplishment also available, even then, to some women. Qualities respected in aristocratic culture were distinctly masculine, military, and formally social, quite different from qualities cultivated by scholarship. It was around those historical events that the operators of dominance culture came to recognize the anarchic impulse intrinsic to the culture of ideality and thinking. Academic freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of thought, freedom of the press, have all been hotly contested political issues, as the recurring theme of book-burning illustrates. Censorship and the banning of books have been common acts of dominance culture. Universal literacy and education enabled a new kind of individualism, a kind established by personally interior cultivation and not in combat over scarce trophies. Entrepreneurship in literary culture eventually constructed the Republic of Letters outside the control of institutions, enabling the Enlightenment and new ideas of human rights and freedoms. Descartes’ declaration: “I am thinking, so I must exist!” truly expresses the potential of modern subjective individualism, a kind of individualism that manifests in the creative authenticity of utterance, of a voice that engages in conversation, instead of in hoards of concrete possessions. The republic of letters is a forum for multitudes of distinctive literary voices.

So, What is Patriarchy?

Patriarchy is the political and economic institutionalization, in the structure of social relationships within a state, of dominance culture at the expense of the appropriate influence and recognition of both nurture culture and the literary culture of ideality. Patriarchy is immersion in the metaphysical ideology of dominance culture, the conviction that social order depends on an edifice of control, power, hierarchy, force, supervision, rules, and contracts. This nearly exclusive institutionalization of the dominance culture is sanctified by a simplified (materialist-friendly) metaphysics of human nature, the Hobbesian view of human ego-gratification, comfortably incorporating a modernized version of the Christian dogma of original sin which asserts that individuals benefit from a system of domination, and that domination is pre-determined by God or nature. Such a competitive materialist view of human nature, the socially pragmatic view, is patriarchal ideology pure and simple, asserting a false metaphysics and a false conception of spirituality. Patriarchal ideology has convinced everybody that some sort of “…archy” is needed to keep us missiles of atomized egoism in check, but neither of the two alternative culture streams tends toward formation of any kind of “…archy”, and that is their strength. They each tend toward strong but less brittle interconnectedness, in fact, anarchic interconnectedness.

Notes

Tensions among the three cultures identified here can be recognized in the essay:

Ur-Fascism, by Umberto Eco, published by The New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995 issue. (A link to this essay was posted on Episyllogism Blog, WordPress, August 11, 2016.) Based on his experience growing up under fascism in Italy in the 1930’s, Eco presents core characteristics of fascism.

Some points in this posting were introduced previously:

Posting 9, October 25, 2011, Political Considerations

Posting 35, July 6, 2012, Transcendental Humanism

Posting 36, July 12, 2012, First Language Nurture

Posting 37, July 26, 2012, Sharing Awareness

Anarchist vs Libertarian

22 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Political Power, Subjectivity

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anarchism, capitalism, competitive materialism, creativity, freedom, individualism, libertarianism, meritocracy, Power, property rights, spirituality

Varieties of Individualism

Tags: spirituality, individualism, freedom, power, anarchism, creativity, competitive materialism, property rights, meritocracy, libertarianism, capitalism

There are two conflicting concepts of individualism, one with a material focus called libertarianism, and the other with a spiritual focus called anarchism. The spiritualist orientation conceives the individual as a gusher of inventive creativity, a fountain from which good things flow. On this view, power is not something that originates from the barrel of a gun, nor is it created by institutional customs and habits of stratification, authority, and subordination. Power originates in the creative freedom of individual spirituality. Emphasis on this spirituality creates a picture in which you want as much originality and sharing as possible, and the best political system is one which enables and enhances that power at the individual level. Tapping into the personally interior gusher of spirituality (intelligence), and bringing spontaneous creations into the world from personal interiority is identified as the way to fulfillment for both individuals and human collectives.

Spirituality, Sociability, Interconnectedness, Equality

Anarchism is an assertion of individual autonomy founded on a vision of human equality. It comes from a history of anti-oppression, and grows organically from the radical enlightenment in European history. Anarchism does not denigrate the importance of human interconnectedness, but makes an effort to remove injustice and top-down human-on-human macro-parasitism from relationships. It is espoused mainly by people who have little property and who live with a history of top-down authoritarian oppression. Anarchism is an assertion of autonomy as a counterforce to lethal violence from historically entrenched factions practicing exploitative repression in the name of some supposedly sovereign community or transcendent civilization.

Competitive Materialism

In the contrasting, and far more common, materialist orientation the individual is conceived as a hollow pit, a kind of black hole, which inherently strives to fill itself by sucking in, taking possession of, and consuming as much as possible of the goods from its environment. Such activity inevitably brings it into conflict with the other black holes in its vicinity. The sucking and the conflict determine the essential character of human existence on the competitive materialist view, which is the matrix of American libertarianism. Libertarians embrace the myth of the free market: competitive self-interest as fundamental and unalterable human nature. On this materialist interpretation of individualism, life is pervasively and inescapably competitive because human nature glimpses fulfillment only by continuous consumption and by winning the conflicts necessary to take the most desirable consumables. Competitions inevitably produce inequality, hierarchy, subordination, and macro-parasitism. The concept “meritocracy” reveals how apparent individualism is meant to morph into an institutionalized power structure, a mechanism of top-down supervision and control. People who win a lot of trophies for themselves are somehow supposed to have shown by that activity that others should be subordinate to them. It is a short slide from libertarianism to fascism.

Given its conception of human nature and motivation, the worldview of American-style libertarians is focused on property rights and ownership of property. The libertarian stance is a declaration of self-identification in terms of trophy-properties and the personal determination to exercise with jealous possessiveness any and all advantages that arise from ownership of property and wealth. It is a rejection of any empathic (ethical) impulse to bond and share, especially with people of colour, again expressing a stratified conception of human relations which is perfectly compatible with racism and xenophobia. This competitive materialism of capitalist free-market libertarianism is a vision of human inequality as essentially good (matrix of magnificent accumulators and their spectacular accumulations), generally espoused by persons who expect to be among those who have plenty. However, embedded in this conception is also an urgent justification for human nature to be controlled because, as an aggressively competitive sucking pit, it is innately unstable and de-stabilizing for social relationships. Since no person is actually viable in complete isolation, even a libertarian expects to have some enduring human relationships. As an expression of political conservatism, the expected relationships of libertarians are hardly matters of speculation, they will be hierarchical and privileging to the masculine as traditionally conceived in the alpha-trophy-looting culture of masculinity.

What makes the possession of property so vital is that it enables living from ownership rather than from labour, which is to say, it enables living on the labour of others. The normal picture of libertarian autonomy assumes ownership of sufficient property to support a profound self-sufficiency. Only a scant few can ever really have such a concentration of resources. Libertarian assumptions are an idealized and sanitized nostalgia for the autonomy of medieval crime family estate owners. Because of that materialist value focus, libertarians are not, and can never be, against strong government (in spite of claims to the contrary). It was those antique medieval versions of libertarians, people dedicated to the strategy of living from property ownership rather than from labour, who conceived and established sovereign governments in the first place, even though they also kept private armies. Owners of property always want the most powerful protection possible against any risk of losing their property, which means they depend on the machinery of armed violence in the form of personal weapons, police, and military organizations, as much of it as can be arranged. Protection of property absolutely requires the “right hand” of sovereign government, the power that comes from the barrel of a gun: armed forces, spies, assassins, and a sovereign who represents property owners, as traditional sovereigns always do. Such sovereignty implies the whole apparatus of class macro-parasitism, and a general culture of top-down orientation, the mass subordination to sovereign power. The propertied minority did not seriously want to restrict sovereign power until governments began to be influenced by people who make a living by labour. Conservative emphasis on the limitation of government became prominent when sovereign governments became, to some extent, an expression of popular choice, chosen by elections with broad enfranchisement.

The Romantic Idealism of Conservative Morality

When individual spirituality is defined as inherently competitive then empathy is ruled out as the basis of morality, since it would always be overridden by anti-other impulses. Without empathy, morality has to be based on the primacy and enforcement of top-down commandments, rules, edicts, proclamations, sometimes presented as metaphysical principles. Right-wing morality is conceived as obedience to a proclaimed list of such virtues and duties: the code of honour, hard work, and self-reliance. (Accepting charity is a moral failing on that view.) Normally, conservative ideology ridicules idealism and conflates it with romanticism as unrealistic and impractical, a cowardly evasion of realism. However, nothing is more romantic and idealistic than promoting authoritarian society based on the ideal of the masculine hero, combined with the idealism of metaphysical virtues and duties. If social arrangements are not constructed on the basis of empathy then they have to be based on enforcement of such metaphysics, and supposing that anyone is qualified to police the commandments requires pure romantic hero romanticism.

Although the purest form of American libertarianism is officially rejected by political parties in the ideological ‘centre’ during election campaigns, some degree of this attitude pervades American culture and capitalist culture generally, so when people like Barack Obama, George Bush, or Ronald Reagan (Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, or David Cameron in the UK), use the word “freedom”, they don’t mean anarchism, they mean the freedom of people with great accumulations to do whatever they like with the vast majority of that wealth, no matter how much publicly created goods such as roads, general literacy, and norms of civility and security of person have contributed to the possibility and production of that wealth. They mean American libertarianism, a freedom for the investor class. That’s all that freedom can mean in capitalism. Other than in anarchism, the political left has no coherent model of an alternative to capitalism nor a philosophically bottom-up or horizontal system of reality, and so, no conception of how to advance beyond capitalism.

Recommended source on anarchism:

The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936, written by Murray Bookchin, published by AK Press (1998), ISBN 1-873176-04-X.

Romantic Idealism and the Mind of God

20 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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1517, 1789, Hegelian idealism, Johann Fichte, Kantian idealism, Martin Luther, Marxism, modernity, nihilism, Platonic idealism, Romantic idealism, Roy Bhaskar, spirituality, The French Revolution, the Kantian revolution, the mind of God, The Thirty Years War, the tragic sense of life

This is Episode 2 of The Tragedy of Romanticism

Tags: Spirituality, Platonic idealism, Hegelian idealism, Marxism, Kantian idealism, the Kantian revolution, Johann Fichte, Romantic idealism, Martin Luther, Roy Bhaskar, the tragic sense of life, nihilism, modernity, The French Revolution, 1789, 1517, the Thirty Years War, the mind of God

Informal Romanticism

The French Revolution of 1789 expressed a primal, informal, romanticism that was an inspiration for the philosophical romanticism that developed soon after. It was a projection outward of subjective aspirations, heroically, against the teeth of practicality and realism as defined by the apparent balance of forces and probable achievements. “This is what we want. I don’t care if dreams cannot come true. This expresses my (spiritual) interiority.” The romantic attitude is the opposite of “practical” and “realistic” as ordinarily used. Plans and proposals that count as practical and realistic always expresses a normative political force. In authoritarian cultures, any kind of change in the organization of wealth, power, or status, is considered unrealistic and impractical, and so romantic. That is core conservative political rhetoric and mind-set. In the conservative lexicon “romantic” means frivolous, trivial, crazy, dangerously destructive. Informal romanticism is an assertion of the power of subjectivity against objective actuality, a willing acceptance of the creative non-actuality of subjectivity, but still asserting its value and power. In addition to privileging subjective non-actuality over brute objective actuality, informal romanticism is also a certain characterization of subjectivity, emphasizing the creative, chaotic, emotionally expressive character of dreams in subjectivity. It doesn’t have to be a denial of the reality of objective actuality, only a categorical rejection of the sovereignty and sufficiency of actuality, a resistance to claims of such a sovereignty. The romantic attitude puts emphasis on the creativity of subjectivity, on subjectivity as lawless and capricious, and so on the removal of subjectivity from the pre-determination of both nature and the normative force of cultural models. (Every individual has normative social conformity requirements in addition to the fall-line of physics to limit the possibilities of overtly manifested creativity.) That removal from pre-determination is here called the spiritual interiority of subjectivity.

There was something wildly terrible, tragic, and beautiful (romantic) about the French Revolution, the doomed efforts of age-long victims of aristocratic macro-parasitism, risking their lives and a marginally viable way of life for a slim hope of justice and dignity. By the time of that revolution, Germans had long ago attempted their revolution in the form of the Protestant Reformation, launched by Martin Luther in 1517, and which eventually brought the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), down on their heads. That history left Germans pretty well intimidated, but still substantially Protestant (in very regulated forms) by 1789. However, it could be argued that the Revolution became necessary in France because the Reformation had been so quickly and brutally repressed in the French Wars of Religion in the second half of the sixteenth century, soon after Luther launched the protestant movement. So, as a continuation of post-Reformation re-thinking of fundamental certainties and possibilities (the Enlightenment movement), the Revolution burst forth, and afterward the reactionary backlash inevitably followed, just as it had against the Reformation.

In yet another historical rebound of cultural forces, philosophical Romanticism was an interpretation of the French Revolution by the German academic, literary, and artistic class, just as the Revolution was a kind of French interpretation of the German Reformation (then more than two centuries in the past). The human interconnectedness is a medium and an echo chamber in which cultural creations get refracted by interpretations from person to person (interiority to interiority) and from group to group. In 1789 Germany was emphatically backward looking in political culture as a legacy of the Thirty Years War. German intellectuals such as Johann Fichte (1762-1814) and the artist known as Novalis (1772-1801) were both excited and repelled by the Revolution because in Germany they were immersed in a neo-medieval ideology of admiration for Christendom and its chivalrous aristocracy, even though they longed for complete freedom of thought at the same time. The young German intellectuals felt the thrill of new freedom but desperately wanted to fit it into the stability of existing (medieval) institutions in Germany. They merely wanted people like themselves to be recognized as meriting membership in the fellowship of the privileged.

Broad Effects of Philosophical Fundamentals

Those historical upheavals and catastrophes are inseparably involved with philosophical fundamentals, and especially philosophical conceptions of idealism, of which romanticism is one particular form. Idealism generally asserts that there is a category of non-actuality which is supra-actual, transcendent, and as such indispensable in any conception of reality. That category is what was described above, in relation to informal romanticism, as the spiritual interiority of subjectivity. Both of the following usages of “ideal” illustrate that special interiority. Certain politicians are described as ‘idealist’ rather than pragmatic. Idealist politicians are aspirational in the sense of striving for something not yet actual, something there is reason to believe would be better, but which might be impossible. Also, there is the sense of idealism in “idealized”, in which things are simplified and imagined in a perfected condition. The “idealized” item is distinct from any actual items, and it is commonly understood that, as such, it is interior to some or other subjectivity as an idea. In articulating the importance of a category of non-actuality, idealism goes “through the looking glass” as far as traditional social structures of all kinds are concerned, and so, much depends on the way idealism is conceived. Idealism is politically explosive because it is an affirmation and embracing of a supra-actuality, something more important than whatever nature, previous history, and the sagacious ancestors have bestowed on the current generation in terms of social norms and ways of seeing the world.

Standard Idealism: Plato and Hegel

The directionality of any human gaze is so laden with what cannot be perceived, with subjective non-actualities such as futurity, aspirations, and lessons learned, (caring, anticipation, evaluation) that it points (in addition to a region of surroundings) in a direction that can only be characterized as personally inward, to an interiority of spiritual non-actuality. Any philosophical idealism is some model of spirituality and a recognition of spirituality as elemental or non-reducible. In other words, idealism is some version of absolute recognition of the special interiority of intelligences. Recognizing the special non-actuality of spiritual interiority gives any position an aspect of idealism. A strong idealism asserts that the most fundamental character of the cosmos is intelligence or spirituality.

Romanticism is a kind of idealism, but not the only kind. For example, Plato’s idealism is quite different, and Platonic idealism has been the most influential by far, having established from ancient times a dominance in the European system of cultural reality that still has considerable force. Plato’s Ideal Forms are profoundly stable, eternal, removed from the space/ time and materiality of the mundane world, and so automatically associated with (the interiority of) some kind of divine super-intelligence. In Platonism, the Ideal Forms occupy a position near the top of a metaphysical hierarchy, a structure of descent from a divine One-ness at the highest level of reality down to a churning multiplicity of ephemeral appearances at the level of everyday experience. Their association with intelligence is far removed from ordinary subjectivity and from the capricious personality which some romantics have imagined as divine intelligence. Also, Hegelian idealism has been vastly influential, especially as it lives on in Marxism, in spite of the declared materialism of Marxism (dialectical materialism). The historical effects of Marxism are yet more consequences of the mutating conceptions of idealism. Hegel’s is clearly a mutation of Platonic idealism, a vision of cosmic history as the striving of all-encompassing universal Being toward full reality and self-recognition as Ideal Form. Hegel retains the Platonic metaphysical structure (including levels of reality not unlike those in Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism), but in Hegelian idealism the universal Being starts from the bottom and is striving up the “chain of ascent” to the divine One-ness at the final and highest stage of reality.

The Kantian Revolution against Platonism

Then there is the kind of idealism which occasioned philosophical romanticism, namely Kantian idealism, which maps out the necessity of personal spiritual activity in the construction of ordinary knowledge of the world, of every individual’s orientation in the world. Kantian idealism is the most personal and subjective of the philosophical visions of spirituality, especially as tweaked by Fichte. Fichte’s early work, in which he first rejects Kant’s idea of “thing-in-itself” and develops the idea of the individual subjective “I” which must posit its entire world, is the clearest alternative to top-down visions of the cosmos in the whole history of philosophy. Fichte’s vision is a re-orientation or re-conceptualization of reality as a whole, situating individual intelligence at the creative source. Such a re-orientation was implicit in Luther’s “leap of faith”, but was not fully articulated before Kant and Fichte, and there could have been no Fichte without Kant. Romantic idealism was clearly a development from Kantian idealism, although hardly a straightforward one.

Although Kant did describe his work as “a Copernican Revolution” in philosophy, it is not clear that he recognized the full bottom-up social and political implications of his personalized idealism. Kant was a social and political moderate-conservative, and as a university professor employed by the state, his livelihood depended on being seen as a supporter of the status quo, more or less. However, the spiritual entity who is the subject having experiences in Kant’s vision is self-legislating and so has no need for the Church, aristocracy, or any other social authority. Personal spirituality for Kant is almost monadic, clearly influenced by Leibniz in that way but completely free of Leibniz’s totalitarian predetermination. Kant’s personally interior idealism would logically lead to an equality of individuals based on autonomous spirituality, and so it implicitly discredited the whole social edifice of aristocracy and the hierarchy of Christendom. That qualifies Kant’s idealism as an extension of the European revolutionary movement into the matrix of ideas. That is the Kantian revolution, although it is doubtful that the early romantic philosophers understood it in that way. Nevertheless, the response in Romanticism was something altogether shocking: a declaration that philosophy as an activity should be abandoned completely and replaced by art; a call to forsake philosophical thinking, the better to seek immersion in poetry, music, stories, and images. That is why romanticism is more prominent as a literary and artistic movement than as a philosophical system. Something in their interpretation of Kantian idealism brought the romantic philosophers face to face with a vision of human tragedy from which they recoiled. The tragedy does not arise from Kantian idealism or Fichte’s absolute I. Those are not tragic visions.

The Tragedy of Romanticism

Radical French philosophers had made an attempt to construct a Plato-busting bottom-up metaphysics with their materialism (in the footsteps of ancient Epicureans), after the suppression of the reformation in France, and it had been remarkably effective up to a point, but it was not sustainable. Materialism and freedom are mutually exclusive. It was Kant’s elaboration of Luther’s idea of spiritual freedom which really accomplished (on the second attempt, so to speak) the bottom-up metaphysics. Kant’s idealism is clearly set at the level of the ordinary individual person because it is in continuous engagement with brute actualities of the ambient world within which the spirituality finds itself, entangled with effects of the “thing-in-itself”. However, the early romantics encountered Kantian idealism in their studies as Fichte’s philosophy students, and so really encountered Fichte’s interpretation of Kant, and they never took it seriously enough as a description of normal individual intelligence or spirituality with broad implications for empathy, sociability, and politics. Romantic philosophers lived in a very hierarchical culture and age. They would have taken value strata among human beings as self-evident givens. The grip of their top-down orientation was so strong that they couldn’t conceive the absence of hierarchy. So, they came to understand Fichte’s absolute “I” (so much more monadic than Kant’s because of the absence of a countervailing thing-in-itself) as a portrait of divine mind, the mind of God. Certainly it could be argued that the main effect of Fichte’s dismissal of the thing-in-itself was exactly to make his conception of spirituality less human and essentially divine.

As a vision of the divine mind, there was profound novelty about Fichte’s “absolute ego” as compared to the God of Abraham, of Maimonides, or even the purely rational God conceived by Leibniz (much closer to Fichte in cultural tradition). The Abrahamic God is bound and limited by goodness and by love for his creatures. However, the philosophy students who were on their way to developing the romantic vision, could not help but see Fichte’s divine subjectivity through the lens of their experience of the French Revolution, an intensely violent uprising completely justified by the stark contrast between the lives of the privileged in European society and the lives of the drudgery classes, gross institutionalized injustices, any change to which threatened the entire social order of their world. In that light, it was impossible to hold onto the idea of divinity limited by goodness. To the romantics, Fichte’s divine mind is absolute monadic creativity, an artist god, with no responsibility to any other and not bound or limited by anything. Fichte’s absolute ego, in its romantic interpretation, was not the slightest bit interested in morality or orderly civil society, and was nothing like perfectly rational as Leibniz’s God was. He issued no demands to humans for obedience, reverence, or worship, but also offered nothing to balance human suffering, no eternal reward, no redemption from guilt. Instead, he was a playful artist creating drama, emotional upheaval, and shocking beauty. In many ways, this was an historically novel concept, including a form of creativity that was broadly applicable to individual humans. With the absolute ego from Fichte, the emphasis is more on creativity than on command, control, reward, or punishment, and that removes some emphasis from command and control generally even in worldly social and political situations. It also recognizes creativity as the core of subjectivity. Fundamentally, it was gender neutral in conception, although in style and application it was full of male bias.

For Romantics, then, there is a single immaterial spirit with a personality and mental life quite similar to a human’s but with infinitely more power. The Romantic deity is an artist. This spirit has dreams, it indulges itself in daydreaming, and those dreams are the world that humans inhabit, ourselves being dream-things in those dreams. Whimsically, he picks certain people to be his prophets, and grants favours and inspiration to certain heroes and artists, like the gods of ancient Greece were supposed to do. Every landscape is an inner landscape for romantics, pervaded with dream code-work, disguises, and multi-layered associations, unrestricted by cultural norms or by the laws of physics. With the inner landscape, things display (obliquely) their emotional meaning in their appearance, as things do in dreams. What romantics saw in this new idealism was the artist God who toys with the world, and with the humans in the world, without any interest in justice or redemption, as proven by the spectacle of the Revolution and the light it shed on social organization and the force of history.

This conception of the divine mind meant that the Christian religion as traditionally constituted, with pledges of eternal reward and redemption, upon which the stability of the European social hierarchy and culture depended, was a lie. Earthly suffering has no meaning other than the whimsical amusement of an omnipotent daydreamer. Romantics saw the political enforcement of Christendom as a version of Plato’s “noble lie” (Republic), and they accepted the necessity of using that lie to preserve the organization of society, so that some small minority at least could devote themselves to beauty and ideal things, supporting and enjoying the arts, the work of artists, for their own immersion in transcendent beauty. The human artist became the example of the optimal, godlike, human being. However, the romantics also felt tragedy in the need to lie to repress the vain aspirations of the vast majority, in a world so made as to depend on such a lie. Privileged people don’t want social justice and can’t want it because for them the age-old forms of injustice are the price that must be paid so that some few (themselves) can live the higher life of refinement, beauty, and ideal things, a milieu enabling such contemplations as math and science, but above all artistic beauty, as close as possible to the life of the high God and as such the authentic heartbeat of their civilization.

On that worldview, we humans are dreamed just enough in God’s image to think sometimes that we have freedom and power to achieve justice, but that thought is an illusion, and so the human situation is fundamentally tragic. The immediate form of our tragedy is the squalid institutions of unalterable human inequality. We must either accept being deceived by the dirtiest of lies or else be parties to proclaiming that lie, and the problem with philosophy is that its history has brought it to the point of exposing the deception and undermining the civilization of the champions of beauty. For romantics, the only real power we have is to dream, to create our interior non-actualities. That is the romantic vision of transcendence available to humans, and they take it as our shield against glimpsing the ugliness of the broader human situation. The romantic idea of the deity is an emphatic confirmation that the social oppression they witnessed was so entrenched as to appear metaphysically decreed.

Romantic idealism, then, is yet another top-down vision of divine spirituality, a mutation of Platonism into a more modern idiom. The real implication of Kantian idealism was completely different, a sort of re-distribution of spiritual creativity and power down from on-high and into the multiplicity of agents engaging in ordinary experience. The romantic vision of tragedy arises by removing spiritual agency from every individual and ascribing it instead to a universal deity, imposing a completely inappropriate top-down orientation on Kant’s vision of interior spirituality. In doing that, philosophical romanticism seems to glorify subjectivity, but in fact trivializes it. The romantic call to leave philosophy and turn to art and culture is profoundly political and strictly conservative. Their nihilism was the angst of the unjustly privileged, an awareness of the stark and pointless contrast between their lives and the lives of the drudgery class.

The Tragic Sense of Life

We are still living with legacies of romantic idealism, for example in the commonplace declaration that “stories are all we have”. The conclusion and fulfillment of that philosophical Romanticism is a resolve to abandon thinking that goes beyond stories and instead to concentrate on moments of subjective ecstasy or rapture in the altered states inspired by poetry, tragic drama, music, and stories of magic, wonders, and heroes. “Since actuality is ugly, depressing, and utterly beyond our control, let’s achieve the transcendence of personal tranquility and joy by listening to awesome music, contemplating beautiful images, or absorbing our minds in narratives of heroism and nobility.” The romantic “elevation” of ideal things is completely idle, and the narrative sparkle and flash of tragic heroes, witches, wizards, demons, exotic locations, high drama, violent conflict, glory in battle, dangerous rescues, lost causes, fatal flaws, futile but beautiful gestures, narrative suspense and satisfying resolutions, are all merely hiding romantic nihilism. That turn of romanticism is very much like mysticism, which embraces the trances and altered states of consciousness resulting from sensory deprivation, drugs, or mortification of the flesh as if they were higher states of being.

Philosophy as Critique of Orientation Within Systems of Reality

15 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Embodiment, Equality, Hierarchy, Narrative, Political Power, Subjectivity

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cosmic personification, critique, intelligence, nature, non-actuality, philosophy, science, systems of reality, the cultural orientation grid, the supernatural, time

Certain givens of nature are crucial for any individual’s orientation in the world: gravity, solidity, the spectrum of electro-magnetic radiation, chemical transfers of energy. The givens of nature are modelled and measured by science. Culture is just as important for orientation: language, technology, economic infrastructure, and institutions. If you approach everything as culture (emerging from biology in some way) then probably you are an anthropologist or sociologist, working to perfect an account of the scientific determinism of human behaviour. You might also be philosophically postmodern, approaching everything as “text”. With some exceptions such as that, to think philosophically is to recognize that personal or subjective non-actualities are also crucial in any individual’s orientation, and that culture and the brute actuality of nature are constructed within a creative orientation which is interior to individual intelligences. Human life is played out by individuals in an encounter between the non-actualities of personal subjectivity and the brute actualities of objective nature. That we are also sponges of culture reveals how much enlargement of intelligence or enrichment of orientation we experience from interconnection with others and their orientations. Culture also constitutes a crucial problem for individuals because it has been tainted by longstanding efforts to legitimize and even sanctify human-on-human macro-parasitism.

The Supernatural in Systems of Reality

In claiming that official systems of reality consist of conceptual constructs of nature, community, and individual subjectivity (in posting 79, January 15, 2015, Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality), it was not helpful that the supernatural went unmentioned. The supernatural is normally given far more emphasis and cultural elaboration than nature, and both nature and culture are often approached as encrypted messages from and about the supernatural. What is crucial, however, is that there is always a special connection between what is supernatural and individual subjectivity, often jointly conceptualized as “spirit”. That special connection is present because the whole idea of the supernatural originates in the experience of ordinary subjectivity: personal intelligence and the intelligences of other ordinary people. Caring, for example, is always and only interior to intelligences. Ethics and ethical judgements, identifications of justice and injustice, are always and only acts of intelligence. It is the same with ideas, abstractions, generalities, and categories. Teleological time, plans for the future, hopes or fears of a certain future, aspirations and intentions to create a certain future and to play among alternative plausible futures, are always and only interior to individual intelligences. Each individual constructs a pluralistic teleology, temporal bearings out of a past and toward an array of increasingly improbable futures, all non-actualities, which is to say, separate from the brute actuality of nature. Time is the miracle of intelligence because it is the matrix of freedom in its non-actuality. Caring, judgments of ethics or justice, and teleological time are all interior to ordinary intelligences. In spite of the fact that everyone’s direct and original acquaintance with those features of experience is in ordinary people, such features still have a supernatural quality. They express novelty and initiative (being alive) instead of merely inertia. Ordinary intelligence, then, is the primary supernatural, and that is why all ideas of the supernatural are ideas about intelligences or features of intelligence.

Whenever these interior features of intelligences are ascribed to the world at large, to nature, or to disembodied entities of any sort, they are inappropriate projections of what can only be interior to an ordinary person’s intelligence. As such, they are distortions of reality, fables, and deceptions that have disabling effects since they falsely personalize or personify nature, transforming nature into a super-person and infusing the whole arrangement with an overriding and centralized moral purpose and caring that cannot be there. Personalizing nature in that way subordinates individual subjectivity within a top-down structure, and trivializes individual subjectivity catastrophically in comparison with some fabulous (false) super-person. It is crucial for intelligence to be present in any model of fundamental reality, but it is just as important that the force of intelligence be correctly located in ordinary individuals.

Intelligence, and so what is supernatural, has generally been erroneously located and attributed. The main error has been in imagining that the intelligence or spirit that is experienced in ordinary people was placed there somehow by a vaster and ‘higher’ intelligence, some grander version of, or entity of, intelligence. Jumping to that conclusion plausibly follows from all the experiences we have of ‘things’ descending from the sky into our local situation. For example, rain arrives from the sky and washes the countryside and streets of the city. It waters thirsty grass, trees, and crops. Later the sun comes out from the clouds and warms the entire face of the earth with its powerful light, and the plants reach up to it. Our immediate survival depends on our eating, drinking, and breathing local bits of that vast environment which is vivified from above. Such experiences arrive in the context of the overwhelming and awesome vista of the starry night sky as seen from our position as embodied individuals, effectively rooted or tethered to solid ground, emphatically located, local, limited, and small compared with the world around us which is apparently endless; and also in the context of our childhood conditioning to having and depending on parental seniority presenting us gifts from the accumulated aids to orientation of a mysterious ambient culture. We are persuaded to imagine top-down models of cosmic reality by this whole awesome vista in which we can seem to be passive receivers.

However, in the case of intelligence, that pattern of remote origination, of fertility, is inappropriate and in fact pernicious. As soon as you posit an original higher intelligence, then it follows that everything that exists is a product of the plans, judgements, intentions, and caring of that higher intelligence. Nature becomes personified as the voice or expression of the higher intelligence, and not only nature but culture as well. The social order and the distribution of power and property all become expressions of the super-intelligence, and as such, sacred and unquestionable. In that context, any imperfections, flaws, or problems have to be attributed to human nature (or flawed co-gods) as a meagre imitation of the super-intelligence, and such a claim has often been used as both a license and an excuse for heinous brutality. However, nothing other than experiences such as rain and the beauty of the Milky Way indicates a remote origin for ordinary intelligence, and such experiences are unconvincing and inapplicable for this purpose. The intelligence of ordinary individuals does not originate from some grander, vaster, version of itself, but rather, each is autonomous in every person, and there is no grander version of intelligence anywhere. And yet, intelligence is still supernatural in every instance. (The imaginative projection of intelligence onto inanimate nature is a testament to the creative power of ordinary intelligences to invent non-actualities.) Ours isn’t the sort of supernatural which magically overrides and negates certain givens of nature, and yet, where nature is restricted to brute actualities, intelligences clearly dream or fountain up multitudes of non-actualities, and then live from them with variable degrees of success.

Re-Conceptualizing Systems of Reality

The mistake of projecting intelligence into the sky, out onto the cosmos at large, has catastrophic consequences by creating a conceptual niche for macro-parasite factions of humans, and those factions have developed pervasive official cultures to exploit that top-down structure. Re-conceptualizing reality is very largely a matter of replacing that longstanding top-down structure, which depends on personifying nature, with a bottom-up structure. In this revised conception of reality, the supernatural is identical with individual subjectivity. When the moral purpose and caring have been purged from the brute actuality of nature and correctly attributed to individual persons, there are consequences for social structure, politics, and economics, since we get beyond the imaginary imprimatur of God or nature on social and political inequality. On this bottom-up perspective, all individual intelligences are supernatural and fundamentally autonomous in their encounter with the givens of nature. The human landscape now becomes more equal and non-hierarchical, not structured as a Great Chain of Being conceived as a chain of command and subordination. However, that we are sponges of culture still reveals how much enlargement of intelligence or enrichment of orientation we can experience from interconnection with others.

Thinking Off-Grid and Leaving the Matrix

Carrying on within the top-down orientation that is massively supported by the ambient culture could be described as “living on the grid”, or “thinking on the grid”. It doesn’t matter if you have a bank account and subscribe to municipal utilities and electronic service networks. Those grids do impose certain limitations and a degree of predictability on an individual’s behaviour, but in terms of a personal orientation which internalizes mechanisms by which external manipulations operate, the great chain of cosmic command is the grid to keep in mind, because it is a cultural matrix in which we project noble motives upward onto the existence of authority instead of recognizing the otherwise obvious motive of macro-parasitism. Anyone with such an orientation can be carried along by culturally crafted voices and image streams claiming authority, spinning out emotional tides through mass corporate media, for example, dramas of mythical collectives such as nation, race, religion, language tribe, class, profession, or economic niche, full of conflicts and crises, the pageantry of nobility and villainy. One of the main incentives and rewards of macro-parasitism is the feeling of (false) grandeur and superiority expressed in and supported by pervasive and elaborate cultural pageantry of inequality and hierarchy. The consumption and luxury of capitalism is all pageantry supporting the illusion of exceptionalism and superiority. Off-grid, what is supernatural is all on the same level, the level of ordinary embodied intelligences, bringing the identification of the supernatural back to its origins and rejecting the unjustifiable fables it has inspired. Off-grid, it is no longer necessary to sanitize the motives and intentions behind the very existence of power and authority. It is possible to replace all the false drama and hierarchy with the project of expressing a personal creative process and cultivating mutually supportive interconnection among equal intelligences. Off-grid the human world is flat but at the same time multiply supernatural and as such unpredictably creative, even though the culture we have inherited from our murky history and which binds us to that history still remains a massive toxic force to be managed.

Note

For an introduction to macro-parasitism see:

Plagues and Peoples, written by William H. McNeill, Published by Anchor (1977), ISBN-10: 0385121229, ISBN-13: 978-0385121224.

Sovereignty and the Myth of Human Nature

20 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Nature

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anarchism, culture, freedom, law, left-wing politics, sovereignty, the great chain of being, Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) described his imagined ‘state of nature’ as a vicious anarchy that was a continuous war of all against all, and Hobbes’ vision has become the default or common idea of anarchism. Hobbes did not recognize that the humans of his vision, who behave as missiles of (aggressive) self-gratification, are under the influence of a certain culture, a culture of human macro-parasitism perfected by nomadic animal herders in very ancient times and soon enough transferred to conquered human communities. A suitable name for that macro-parasitic culture would be ‘Aryan masculinity’ from the most famous historical group of conquering herders out of the great Eurasian steppes (‘Aryan(s)’ means ‘lord(s)’*). When there are lords, or better, barons, expressing the culture of Aryan masculinity there are always human livestock, underling workers forced into servitude to the barons. Since that is a culture and not a racial trait (nor inherent to human nature), the practitioners are long past being visibly Aryan or anything else in particular. The cultural poisoning from Aryan masculinity ( “to the victor belong the spoils”, glorification of living from top-down human-on-human macro-parasitism) is even now pervasive and normalized, and was so already in Hobbes’ time, which accounts for his (and the previous Christian) view of human nature. The war of all against all is the concept of ‘anarchy’ from within the cultural matrix of Aryan masculinity. If the human population consisted entirely of Aryan-cultured males, each expressing his alpha-trophy-looting will-to-power impulses, then indeed the human condition would tend toward a war of all against all.

Law

When the Aryan-cultured barons got around to attempting to limit their own lethality among themselves, they constructed a personified law by making a person into law, a sovereign, constituting the nucleus of a single Aryan superman on a massive collective scale. They did it by designating the most dominant among them as sovereign leader and then all aligning as projections and extensions of that person. The alignment was primarily military, an organization of aggressive violence, with all sovereign operations conceived as variants of the military organization and spirit. The collective beast so created, which Hobbes called Leviathan, a sovereign-owned-and-operated collective (and which we still endure today) is a mammoth replica of the individual Aryan male driven by competitive ambitions, with a brittle pride (honour) quick to take offence at disrespect, insubordinate autonomy, or resistance; its acquisitive appetites engorged by culture to smother universal empathy and nurturing impulses generally. Devotees of the macro-parasitic culture are persuaded to put up with some personal limitations within the social beast Leviathan because each one can participate in the institutional projection of a massive will-to-power and feel himself enlarged by the conquests and sparkly trophies of his sovereign Leviathan, a share of those trophies becoming personal rewards for devoted loyalty. The most commonly recognized form of Leviathan is the sovereign state, originally some form of monarchy, but other forms are common and can include corporations, crime families, and organized religions, as well as less formal cultural associations or communities of ethos such as organized class consciousness.

The father-figure sovereign, as sovereign, was mythologized as a redeeming force, seeming to lift individuals out of their selfishness, but in fact just absorbing them into a larger selfishness. Rejection of that kind of sovereignty, lordship, and hierarchy is the essence of the egalitarian political left-wing, but rejection of Aryan-type or Leviathan sovereignty, in which the body social is an institutionalized Aryan male on a gigantic scale, is not promotion of war of all against all. Instead, it is promotion of a richer understanding of individual creative intelligence, lacking the top-down idea that humans as individuals need to be redeemed or saved by a herder of some kind, inherently in inescapable debt, owing everything to the higher power which was able to herd them (obvious Aryan propaganda).

The Big Lie of the Macro-Parasite Faction

Whenever there is an authoritarian form of society, a chain-of-command society with a top-down structure of power, it is a legacy of the culture of Aryan masculinity which glorifies macro-parasitism. The grand strategy of the macro-parasitic patriarchy is to convince everyone that Aryan masculinity is the inevitable essence of human nature. “Yes, we all contain evil, but we are the same as everybody, just doing what anyone does when they can, because that is human nature. We need a higher power to press us to do somewhat better.” (The real essence of “human nature”, or rather human individuality, is living in time, which is to say, freedom. Culture has the effect of masking the creative freedom of individuals.) As long as the Aryan view of human nature is accepted, then some authoritarian sovereignty, such as the one described by Hobbes, is necessary for the most basic security of person. However, Aryan masculinity is not inevitable human nature, and insisting that it is is the Big Lie, the Big Ignoble Lie, of the macro-parasite faction. Fear of philosophical thinking is built into the culture of that faction because a philosophical ‘phenomenology of innocence’ refutes the lie and enables a more accurate recognition of human individuality. Another way of saying this might be be to say that the strategy of the macro-parasitic faction is to convince everyone that there is a determinate human nature within a determinate Great Chain of Command (Being), whereas a personally conducted phenomenology of innocence reveals freedom.

* Indian Thought and its Development, written by Albert Schweitzer, translated from German by Mrs. Charles E.B. Russell, published by Henry Holt and Company Inc. (1936). See page 20.

Bottom-Up Metaphysics

12 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Embodiment, Strategic thinking, Transcendence

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bottom-up politics, community, creativity, culture, Enlightenment, freedom, history of ideas, individuality, intelligence, nature, philosophy, religion, science, subjectivity

Re-Conceptualizing Individual Intelligence

Modernity is a system of reality which, once again, profoundly misrepresents, undervalues, and under-appreciates individual intelligences simply as such, so the Enlightenment-era campaign to strengthen the dignity and autonomy of individuals (by recognizing our inherent rationality) was not sufficient. In fact, that campaign was undermined by the very materialism it used to get human nature back down to earth from the Christian kingdom of eternity in the sky, to subvert the claims of parasitic Old Regime social supervisors to be the appointed vicars of the God of eternity. History has shown that metaphysical determinism of any kind, including scientific materialism, ultimately justifies everything about the way things are, the entire status quo. The justifiers of top-down human parasitism have figured that out and use it strategically to legitimize their privileged advantages. In the triumph of science, the materialists and determinists have officially won the quarrel of ideas, and now confidently claim all the intellectual high ground, but that has not had the liberating political and social consequences promised by the eighteenth century radical materialists. Quite the reverse. The determinability of the human machine of scientific fables has inspired the parasite factions to exert utmost effort to control and program human behaviour generally. So yet again, it is necessary to re-conceptualize reality to increase the recognition of power and autonomy in individual embodied intelligences.

All institutional systems of reality that we know of have served the interest of human parasite factions in keeping the majority of people subordinate and vulnerable through distortions of self-identification within a culturally imposed system of reality, often dominated by religion, for example, and as such defining individuals as subordinate to invisible super-beings. Of the ‘three punch combination’ of the Enlightenment, presented in the previous posting (79, January 15, 2015, Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality), the most important and effective punch was enriching the conceptualization of individual subjectivity by adding rationality to it, increasing the dignity of individuals universally, empowering and enhancing individuals by recognizing their inherent and autonomous intelligence. Crucially, that was not an isolated historical precedent. Martin Luther’s civilization-shaking breakthrough in the sixteenth century was also an empowerment of every individual as able to transcend doubt and uncertainty by taking an interior leap of faith, and in so doing ‘positing’ (to use the expression that Fichte applied to such creative acts) a system of reality, which in Luther’s case was the system of Christian reality. In addition, there is a Stoic background to Luther’s vision, but Luther’s conception of the individual’s power to posit a system of reality goes beyond the Stoic power to assent, or not, to the entire Logos of the world. It is also noteworthy that Luther’s re-conceptualization came in the wake of Wycliffe’s fourteenth century push for vernacular (proletarian) literacy, which was soon supercharged by the spread of printing technology. There is a deep and rich tradition here, an effective philosophical movement to enhance the recognition of individuals in the teeth of dominant cultures which exert every effort to do exactly the opposite. Since enhancing and enriching the understanding of individuality was the most important effort of the Enlightenment, but imperfectly achieved, it remains the most important objective in re-conceptualizing our system of reality.

Re-Thinking Transcendence

Re-conceptualizing our system of reality should begin, this time, by separating intelligences individually off from nature. Although it seems, at first, a difficult thing in our materialist system of reality to separate anything off from nature, it is easy in the case of intelligences because nothing more is needed than the clear distinction between strict actuality and non-actuality. Strict categorical actuality is nature. There are no non-actualities in nature, by definition, and yet there are countless non-actualities in any person’s experience, for example: futurity as a construct of aspirations for peace, pleasure, fun, and love, a construct of hopes and fears. Nature at large contains no non-actualities, and yet non-actualities are crucial features of the orientation or question-bearings of individual intelligences. Teleological time, for example, is a construct of non-actualities: mutually exclusive possibilities and hoped-for resolutions, contradictions and negations, regrets, bearings toward increasingly remote probabilities and ‘long-ago’s, and readiness to seize second chances. All this non-actuality is entirely interior to individual intelligences. Intelligences construct our non-actualities into appropriate anticipations or expectations of what is going to happen now, in the next moment, hour, day, in such a way as to insert into actuality (at considerable metabolic cost) our personally intended futurity of love, energy, dignity, and pleasure. Intelligences transcend nature because, in creating a personal situation out of a play of non-actualities, we use our non-actualities as the matrix of our freedom, something entirely alien to pre-determined nature.

This is an individual intelligence resisting and overcoming the brute particularity of nature by what we call living, building personal expressions, being in a life. Since time as experienced requires an elaborate structure of non-actualities identifiable only in the interior bearings of a personal gaze, consideration of time immediately requires a plunge into the interiority of individual intelligences and as such beyond the conceptual reach of materialism. So, considerations of teleology, time, and freedom, or, uniting all three, intelligences, stand as fatal problems for materialist reductionism. In a world of complete and perfect determinism (perfectly actual particularity) time collapses into a meaningless infinitesimal instant. Only teleological freedom dilates time (interior to particular intelligences) with conceptions of a life’s possibilities, each judged with degrees of improbability and personal costs (embodiment).

Actuality vs Non-Actuality

It is long past time to develop the tradition of enhancing the recognition of individuals universally, and this time it should be done by re-conceptualizing the individual intelligence as the ultimate transcendence in its power to create non-actualities, that is, to create non-actualities that re-configure actuality, to create effective or instrumental non-actualities. The crucial distinction is not between Being and Nothingness (a non-actuality), or between Being and time (another non-actuality), but instead something prior to both, the distinction between actuality and non-actuality. Non-actuality expresses creativity, and as such is not pre-determinable from any actuality. This is the duality that finally breaks the mystical visions of monism, whether materialist or idealist. What is gained from this duality is a recognition of a profound individual freedom, which many people purport to treasure. It is not clear that anything of comparable importance is gained from monism, including the materialist monism of science.

Top-down Systems of Reality

It seems that in the culturally conditioned conceptual pattern of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe it was impossible to separate teleology, freedom, and creativity from the idea of the monotheistic God of the Abrahamic religions, a superhuman divine intelligence. It was impossible to conceive teleology, freedom, and creativity as strictly limited to the scale of individual embodied people, and so localized, limited, plural, and distributed as animal bodies are distributed. Apparently it seemed to the radical philosophers of that time and system of reality that in order to eradicate the superstition of an omnipotent super-parent which effectively legitimized the supremacy of human parasites, it was necessary to abandon transcendence entirely, and so to embrace just nature and total determinism. However, the whole social and political point of their work was an assertion of individual autonomy and freedom of thought, and so, in their determinist materialism, they defeated themselves.

Always, the main barrier to recognizing individual intelligences as autonomous eruptions of transcendent freedom has been the pre-supposition that the powers of intelligences are gifts from some origin greater than the individual: a deity, or a cosmic logos or force of libidinal vitality, or just the pre-determined course of natural law. However, those are all assumptions mandated culturally by an overall top-down structure in systems of reality, and a critical re-thinking of experience reveals that individual intelligences are, in our interiority of non-actualities, independent and autonomous sources of creativity. The non-actualities created spontaneously by individual intelligences are not mysteriously injected from outside, are not expressions of an occult cosmic teleology, vital libidinal force in nature, or a disembodied super-intelligence. They are just what they seem to be: creations of particular embodied intelligences. It is undeniable that intelligences are sponges of the creations of other intelligences, of culture, and that many non-actualities are manipulated by culture and imitated by individuals, and so originate from outside in that sense. However, culture is entirely the product of the creativity of previous multitudes of individual intelligences.

The Pluralism of Freedom

The currently standard conception of freedom is well represented by the Freudian model described in the previous posting cited above. On that model, it makes no sense to say that freedom comes from individual nature (biology manifested as the compulsive drives of id) or from individual ego-personality (merely a pattern of balance among external forces), but only as something from the superego, something arranged socially and culturally, a quality of the constraints and opportunities visited upon individuals by institutions of sovereignty, deity, and economics. Freedom defined in that way is a sort of revokable parental indulgence like borrowing the family car, which isn’t an impressive freedom. The considerations of actuality and non-actuality presented above uncover a different freedom, a freedom that is inalienable from individual intelligences. On this re-conceptualized system of reality, freedom is an inherent feature of any individual intelligence, and, most important of all, such freedom suddenly establishes a bottom-up reality.

Currently, what might seem like an uneasy co-existence of Medieval Christian and modern scientific systems of reality is in fact the co-operation of two systems that have much in common. There is an easy transition from monotheism to science, since both are examples of top-down visions, both conceiving a cosmic force or set of forces determining everything in every particular detail. Scientific materialism replaces the omnipotent god with omnipotent universal laws. Asserting the transcendent freedom of individuals-as-such departs decisively from the exclusivity of science for understanding events, but not only that. It also departs decisively from the whole historically dominant tradition of top-down metaphysics which includes both religions and science. Top-down metaphysics is an abstraction from social subjugation, which, in a most vicious circle, is ideologically mutated into a distorted vision of transcendence and then used to legitimize the worldly subjugation. Departing from the exclusivity of science will challenge those committed to modern visions of reality. Departing from the exclusivity of religion will sorely try others. However, this recognition of transcendence in individuals is implicit in the evolution through Stoicism and Epicureanism, to Wycliffe, to Luther, to the radical Enlightenment, and to Kant and Fichte, not to mention the immediate personal experience of intelligence.

We have to re-conceptualize the prevailing system of reality so that intelligences do not disappear as we currently do into pre-determined nature or into other-worldly eternity, but instead stand as autonomous and creative forces at the level of every individual. Separating intelligences off from nature, without removing ourselves to a metaphysical cloud of eternity, changes conceptions of both nature and community, the other pillars of cultural reality. It changes the concept of nature by removing nature as the be-all and end-all explanation and justification of the entire status quo, specifically by removing from nature the ultimate sources of individual behaviour and force, such as from a biologically determined will-to-power which makes individuals little more than missiles of self-gratification. Nature remains as the sum total of the strictly and categorically actual, distinct from all non-actualities such as past and future.

The observation that transcendence is not external to individuals but instead is internal to every intelligence is not new. Fichte, for example, can be cited as someone who declared it, but the idea is common. We read such things as, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” The problem is that nobody seems able to remain true to that idea, apparently because of the ingrained top-down structure of historical systems of reality. There is always a drift away from ordinary individuals toward some metaphysical cosmic force or intelligence, an absolute I or a vital creative dimension to all existence, which concludes by once again rendering the ordinary individual-as-such completely unfree and alienated from the origin of agency and creativity. This also becomes an excuse for embracing the tragic or Romantic-nihilist view of life, the view that injustice is an essential part of the cosmic process so that no one is accountable and nothing can be done about it (for example, in Foucault following Nietzsche).

Re-Conceptualizing Community and Transcendent Self-Possession

Both actual and potential forms of community are re-modelled when individual intelligences are recognized as autonomously creative. Separating intelligences off from nature to recognize the creative freedom of individuals creates a far different potential for empathic interconnectedness as the foundation of community. The animalistic/ instinctual urges become individually manageable and non-lethally pleasurable, put into proportion by the pleasures of expressing an ever-developing personal creative process, as well as by the exciting enlargement that individuals experience in sustainable attachments with others. The need for ownership-type superegos structured into social organization disappears entirely. In this light the existing society is revealed as structures of top-down human-on-human parasitism, sustained by cultural distortions obscuring and legitimizing the entrenched parasitism. Recognizing the parasitic impulse in the fabric of all hierarchical institutions and systems of subordination, especially those of sovereign states and commercial corporations (power and wealth), reveals immediately that messages within ambient culture about the preciousness of civilization as a matrix of high values and personal elevation or fulfillment are all malign manipulations, against which the only defence is identification of points of reference prior to and independent of cultural programming. That defence is a philosophical thinking which establishes for each individual a transcendent self-possession within a bottom-up system of reality, emphasizing everybody’s personal predicament of being in a life, with the unceasing urgencies of building that life laboriously in an embodied particularity made elastic and indefinite by the creative powers of an individual intelligence.

Note: Here are some views of Fichte:

Romanticism, A German Affair, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated from German by Robert E. Goodwin, published by Northwestern University Press (2014), ISBN 978-0-8101-2653-4.

Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, written by Anthony J. La Vopa, Published by Cambridge University Press (2001), ISBN-10: 0521791456, ISBN-13: 978-0521791458.

The Roots of Romanticism, written by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, Published by Princeton University Press (2001), ISBN-10: 0691086621, ISBN-13: 978-0691086620.

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Category Archives: Class War

Politics is Metaphysics (3): Crisis of the Left

Western History

Canadian Values

What is Patriarchy?

Anarchist vs Libertarian

Romantic Idealism and the Mind of God

Philosophy as Critique of Orientation Within Systems of Reality

Sovereignty and the Myth of Human Nature

Bottom-Up Metaphysics